Just as the political apparatchiks are cranking themselves up for an imminent election, the fallout from another is about to begin. This week Philip Schlesinger, David Miller and William Dinan of the Stirling Media Research Institute (SMRI) publish Open Scotland?, a damning critique of political communications in Scotland, which alleges that the 1999 voter education campaign for the Scottish Parliament, which was co-ordinated by the Scottish Office in Westminster, was fatally flawed and that the main beneficiary of these errors was the Labour Party.

Empirical research into political trends has become unfashionable these days, Miller contends. "Many of the radicals of the 60s and 70s have drifted off into the arcane language game known as postmodernism or to other exotic theories from the left bank, in which nothing but language was real," says Miller. "As a result, not only did they not do empirical research on the real world, but some of them didn't even believe that there was a real world to research. With the abandonment of concepts of truth and reality, it became rather hard for researchers to point out the latest piece of government misinformation, secrecy or manipulation."

Miller is not alone in these beliefs. Rod Tiffen of the University of Sydney in Australia recently commented that it is "amazing how many media scholars there are, and how little work on some of the most basic and important trends". Ivor Gaber, emeritus professor of broadcast journalism at Goldsmiths College, University of London, said: "As a former university head of department, I recall with despair my attempts to persuade colleagues to consider undertaking research projects that either the Economic and Social Research Council or the media industries might want to fund."

Miller goes on to say that to many of the new breed of academics, whose desire to climb the greasy pole is matched only by their reluctance to rock the boat, the notion of independent research is anathema. It doesn't pay well, it's time-consuming and it's potentially controversial. None of which is exactly career-enhancing within the academic establishment. "You do get whispering campaigns," says Miller. "You hear that such and such a person is a trouble maker, and before long the gossip has become fact. No wonder so many academics are frightened of looking into areas where they're not wanted. Jobs are hard to come by, and the structures by which academic performance is measured are designed to favour consensus. The Research Assessment Exercise gives far greater reward to academics whose articles appear in international peer-reviewed journals, which research has shown are read by an average of between 1.5 to 6 people, than to those who are prepared to engage in a more public debate."

David Miller cites Anthony Giddens, the director of the London School of Economics, as the champion par excellence of the grand theorists. "He claims to be temperamentally unsuited to empirical research," says Miller, "but the result is that he is so little of a threat that he is welcome at Downing Street."

Giddens is not without his supporters, however, as some academics reject suggestions that researchers have become less critical of the government and argue that more academics should follow in Giddens' footsteps.

"My problem is that academics are too critical: they end up in carping mode," said Julian LeGrande, professor of public policy at the LSE, whose work influenced New Labour's health and welfare policies. "There are not enough people like Giddens looking at broad policy and having a positive impact on government. The RAE encourages researchers to be increasingly specialist, focusing on in-depth narrow topics, not broad policy sweeps."

Even so, three people who are almost certain to find themselves crossed off Tony and Cherie's guest list - assuming they were ever on it - are Schlesinger, Miller and Dinan, who compared the public pronouncements on the Scottish voter education campaign with what actually happened and found some disturbing discrepancies.

The elections for the new Scottish parliament were the first in Britain to introduce an element of proportionality into the voting system, in a bid to ensure that the voices of some of the smaller parties were heard. Each elector got two votes - the first was allocated on a first-past-the-post system, and the second on a proportional basis. It was a complicated system, but Donald Dewar, the then secretary of state for Scotland, stated in October 1998 that he wanted "to make sure that every individual understands the impact of the votes he or she casts".

In official documents, the rather more conservative aim of giving the voters "sufficient" information was put forward, but even by this lower standard the research team believes it is highly debatable whether the campaign met its aims.

"Six weeks after Donald Dewar made a statement pointedly giving examples where the SNP could lose out if its party's supporters cast their vote differently from the first one," says Miller, "the commitment to explain their voting system disappeared from internal campaign documents." Scottish Office officials, Miller claims, had anticipated that Labour would be the party which would most likely suffer the most if its own supporters voted differently. All that did appear by way of voter information was a largely unintelligible fact sheet that the government's own research shows was understood by very few.

One effect was that 112,586 Labour supporters in Glasgow alone wasted their second vote by voting Labour twice. "Labour had its full complement of representatives through the first ballot, so voting Labour twice was a waste of a second vote," says Miller. "It's possible that some voted Labour twice merely to keep another party out, but it is more likely they didn't understand the system. Research has also shown that when the system was explained to them, some respondents said they would have voted differently had they known. If only a proportion of Labour voters across areas of Scotland dominated by Labour had used their second vote differently, it is reasonable to conjecture that smaller parties like the Scottish Socialist Party and the Greens, as well as the Lib-Dems and SNP, could have gained a few extra MSPs. The ambition for proportionality was undermined. "The evidence suggests that something odd happened in the production of the campaign. We don't know if it was incompetence or deliberate, but the final campaign did not properly explain the voting system."

Not one to mince words, Miller argues that academics too often leave it to journalists to dig out political scandals; and that many of their peers have been neglecting their duties to the public in this area. "Academic salaries are paid for out of public funding," Miller points out. Theoretical research may still have a large part to play in the wider political and intellectual debates, but Miller believes that not enough academics are prepared to enter the political arena at a hands-on level.

The research team is now at the forefront of the campaign for the lobbying system in the new parliament to be regulated, and it has been critical of some journalists for offering ministers and civil servants media training. And while it may not always produce the results that the government has in mind, it still attracts kudos and respect for its independence. "We are consulted by government and other official bodies, who regard us as a source of relevant advice," says Schlesinger. "The key issue for me is that we're attempting to do some public policy research and present public interest arguments about devolution which seem not to be coming from anywhere else just now. This is a key role for academia. In my view it sets us apart from thinktanks, and because we have no-strings funding we can offer an honest view based on as exhaustive a research process as the constraints allow."

LeGrande concedes the point on think tanks. "There is some truth in the view that academics are becoming displaced by the think tanks as the architects of new ideas," he says. "the think tanks dominate discussion on policy because most academics are so specialised."

Miller would argue that the key issue is not specialisation so much as independence. And independence may not always bring its just rewards. Oxford is still paying for its refusal to grant Lady Thatcher an honorary degree, as millions of pounds from the Thatcher Foundation head east towards Cambridge, and many universities continue to measure their success by the research grants they can attract. Whether Stirling will welcome this latest publication is uncertain. But the Scottish electorate should be profoundly grateful.

 Open Scotland? is published by Polygon on March 28. Additional reporting by Lee Elliot Major